Sifting for Grains of Truth

The field of regenerative ag marketing is getting crowded. There are ways to separate the wheat from the chaff, and avoid inauthentic projects.

Suppose you’re a bright young sustainability manager working on a corporate regenerative campaign, and your bosses and their bosses – right up to the top leadership in the firm – have instructed it be 100% authentic. Who can you trust today to help start creating legitimate, bulletproof claims that will be years in the making?

In order of priority, the key success factors to consider are this:

• Funding Sources: Global agribusiness giants tend not to contemplate field-level traceability in label claims. Joiners in these programs today won’t be able to profit from full supply chain ESG reporting and Scope 3 emissions reporting to be required in future years.

• Scientific Process: Selecting standard criteria and implementation procedures to score into the certification should be clearly articulated as coming from independent and credible professional experts. As early participants in voluntary carbon markets have learned, the eventual validation of early-stage claims represents a long-term brand risk.

• Governance: The organization should be led via multiple tiers operating at arm’s length, to ensure responsible fact-checking happens around the development of marketing messaging. All the rest are just trying to tell a story the public wants to hear, rendering project participants vulnerable to future criticism of greenwashing.

• Audited third-party validation of the certification criteria is key to restoring end-user trust in the brand and its supply chain… a.k.a ‘market access.’

Previous research has highlighted some of the recently-launched, successful and trusted regenerative labeling protocols and their keys to success. This week, thanks to another great piece from Niall Haughey, another standard has surfaced, in cotton, with potential implications for the global grain supply chain.

Introducing regenagri®

Whoever that bright young sustainability manager was at Olam Agri back in 2020 knew what to look for. More about regenagri® can be learned in the founder’s workshop presentation at Groundswell (the mega-fun UK regenerative agriculture festival held every summer), but it takes a deeper dive into the program’s assessment methodology to discover the nuggets that have allowed it to scale.